A GUI (graphical user interface) is widely used as an interface used when a user inputs and outputs information into and from a computer system (hereinafter called a system). The GUI may be evaluated to evaluate system usability. An example of evaluating the GUI is to check, on a data entry screen provided by an evaluation target system the usability of which is to be evaluated, whether data input is indispensable or optional, check whether there is notation of restrictions on input characters (input character restrictions) in terms of the character attributes of an input text (such as character type like full-pitch/half-width and the number of characters), and check whether the notational conventions are standardized within the system. The evaluation criteria, including whether data input is indispensable or optional and the input character restrictions, are called “restrictions on data input.”
When these evaluations are made manually, an evaluator checks for differences in expressions in input components and around the input components, speculates the expressions of input conditions from the results of giving various inputs, and checks whether the expressions are standardized on all screens to be evaluated. When the evaluation is made manually, its evaluation workload increases. In addition, there is a possibility that problems are overlooked. Note that the text input component is, for example, the display of a shape such as a rectangle displayed on an evaluation target screen, i.e., an area (text box) in which the user is urged to enter a text or the like.
There are known a GUI automatic evaluation device for automatically evaluating a GUI and a test conducting device (for example, see Patent Documents 1 and 2). The GUI automatic evaluation device described in Patent Document 1 inputs a screen designing guide and accumulates guide data as format rules. The device also accumulates, as information on the GUI, attribute information and attribute values for each window in a system to be evaluated. Then, the device checks the information on the GUI against the rules for each window and outputs the checking results. A means for generating the information on the GUI from the product specifications, a source program, a GUI building tool or the like is also described in Patent Document 1.
In the testing device described in Patent Document 2, an operation database (DB), a user sequence designated by a user when executing a test and a complementary sequence executed complementarily to execute the user sequence according to a procedure are stored. Then, when executing the user sequence according to the user sequence execution procedure, the device checks for the state of the GUI. When the user sequence cannot be executed, the operation DB is searched for an appropriate complementary sequence so that the user sequence will be executed after the complementary sequence is executed. The test conducting device described in Patent Document 2 can conduct a test for automatically performing a predetermined operational procedure.
A web screen creating tool, which is capable of checking for the appropriateness of a term or word on a web screen, is described in Patent Document 3. The web screen creating tool checks a source file of the web screen for homonyms, declensional Kana endings and synonyms of terms pre-registered as being likely to be misspelled. Specifically, when a registered term is detected on the web screen to be evaluated, alternatives to the term are displayed as a list.